HIGH SPEED NETWORK DATA EXTRACTOR

The present invention describes a system and method of extracting and storing data elements from network packets, thus performing the task of data mining. In one embodiment of the present invention incoming packets are decomposed one protocol layer at a time to extract data elements contained in the protocol headers. Layer-specific parsers perform deep packet inspection in order to extract data elements from upper-level protocols. Extracted data is arranged in rows, which are subsequently stored into a memory-based accumulator. After some length of time the accumulator is flushed to disk files. Another process reads the flushed disk files row-by-row, inserting each row into a relational database. Standard SQL operations are performed on the relational database in order to generate and display reports of the collected data.